Hello Blog.
Hello everyone who reads this blog.
Hello google-bot.
Hello world.
It’s me. Daniel. Back again. Exciting, wot?
So, we’re back in the UK. I arrived back here literally 4 hours before getting on to a bus to go to TeenStreet in Germany, which we (OMNIvision) were doing video and some sound and lights and so on for. After two weeks of running this event, which I will tell you all about - later, which was very cool, we came back to the UK.
10 days later, Adam, Becky and myself went across to the Nederlands for our friends Jurgens and Eleanor’s wedding. Which was lots of fun. We came back after that to the the UK again.
Bridget (from that biggish place near New Zealand… um, forgottern what it’s called. Aus something? Something with trailers? or something?) also came with us back to the UK, and was here with us for about a month, hanging out, working at OMNIvision, and so on.
Then 10 days ago (or so) Bridget took us over to Malta, so see the Logos Hope for a few days, and also Becky’s dad and church there. I’d never been to Malta before, but Becky grew up there, so that was VERY cool. Malta is beautiful.
I’ll be posting more detailed stuff and photos later.. This is just to catch y’all up to date, you know.
So. We then came back to the UK, last week.
Now for the next scattered layer of events in between those all.
Yesterday we ran the video and lights for the Northern Women’s Convention, which we’ve been doing for the best part of a decade every year now, I believe.
On friday morning, we set up our whole smaller OB unit (the bus - aka “The Tardis”) at the main office for devotions, we filmed a bunch of stories people were telling. We hadn’t set up the unit in a while, so this was good to check everything was working before the Women’s convention… one bad camera cable, one missing focus adaptor, not much else actually wrong.
Two weeks ago, just before going off to Malta I ran sound and we did a spill-over room for the local Baptist church - as they had a new minister arriving (for the first time in decades) and so there were a few hundred people along. I’m in the middle of overhauling our sound equipment / side-racks stuff, so it’s good as well getting these smaller gigs to test things on.
I also went down to the Quinta and ran sound for them for their big 30 years Quinta+OM celebration a few weeks ago.
I do enjoy doing live sound stuff. I still wonder quite frequently if I should somehow go and do some more official training for it…
Oh well.
So, that’s the grand scope of my last few months, I’ll post more details soon.
Back from Spain. It went really well. Really great people, and it was cool helping to support technically all these guys who are so excited by what they’re doing.
Quite a surprise that some friends from Cyprus were particpants at the conference! So it was quite cool meeting up with them!
We’ve been back a week now. Becky was with some friends down south, and I was up in Carlisle finishing off some projects, and then we met up again on Friday, here at the Quinta.
Last time I was here, was for a few days break after my first 2 years on Doulos. I’m now here with Becky for a couple of days debrief with our home-office, and talking to some of the new people who are joining the company in september about life on board the ships.
It’s again quiet, relaxing, and also very good hanging out with some of my friends from the Doulos who are living and working here now.
I managed to spend catch lunch with my brother and some friends in Birmingham on the way down.
Here’s a crazy story:
Trying to buy tickets to get here, straight from Carlisle to Quinta would cost 40 pounds+… but if I booked Carlisle to Birmingham, and then Birmingham to Quinta, it cost 26.
I do NOT understand why. I blaim computers. They’re evil. It’s all a conspiracy.
We only have a few weeks more at Carlisle, for now, and hope to fly to Cyprus in about a month. Probably.
Then, hopefully, God willing, etc, to come back here for a few years starting some time in the summer.
We’ll see how that all goes.
This evening we’ll be heading down to catch a ferry to Spain.
Exotic holiday time? Um, no.
Eloping? Um, also no.
Work? Yes. My name’s Daniel, and I’m a workaholic. I know.
So, there’s a conference in Spain, which our team here is covering the audio/visual side of. So we’ll take the Outside Broadcast bus down by ferry, stuffed to the gunwhales (if busses have gunwhales, but anyway. Stuffed…) with equipment, and also a blue van equally stuffed full of equipment. Due to ferry time-tables, we arrive a bit earlier than we need to, so Becky and I can visit her mum for a day or so en route - which is pretty cool! Then we’ll arrive at the hotel, and set up. The reason for the whole bus is that they also want everything videod and recorded, so we’ll be doing a 3 camera shoot, and producing DVDs of it.
Becky will be running a camera, while I’ll be in the bus operating the Camera Control Units, routing, recording, graphics and so on. I’m quite new at this - and while I got to do some last time I was with the team 2 years ago, I’m also quite glad that it’s the usual chief engineer directing, so I can learn from him.
Anyway. Time to go and pack…
Today marks 2 months of Becky and me being at OMNIvision, up in Carlisle. Time… is weird. It has gone so fast, and yet it seems like we’ve been here for only a few weeks, and yet Doulos is like another world away in the past.
I guess there will be another 200 odd people around the globe feeling the same way right now… and about 300 people every year have been feeling that for the last 30 years.
Our work is a bit random - we hardly know what we’ll be doing, one day to the next. We spent a lot of time in our first week or two pulling wires out of a big OB truck, then about 10 days sorting out books, inventorying, etc, then a few days moving a server rack across the building, including making and crimping all the new cables/extensions. Then a bunch of random small editing projects, a live concert in Manchester (me on a camera, Becky as my “cable monkey”), Becky is working a lot on admin stuff - figuring out some of the shipping arrangements for equipment, and writing the OMNIvision manual, and I’ve been doing some cleaning, sorting, lighting design, editing, fixing stuff, inventorying equipment, measuring cables, pulling electric cables through ceiling spaces, writing 30 second advert clips, and so on…
Yes. Quite busy.
And yet, not… it feels in some ways a lot more relaxed and slow than Doulos… yet also it feels a bit like I have less free time.
Becky and I live about 20 minutes walk apart, and neither of us have cars. The Office - where we go 2 mornings a week - is 15 minutes one direction, and the Studio - where we work the rest of the time - is 20 minutes the other direction. Busses are slow, somewhat irregular, and expensive, so we’re spending a LOT of time travelling. Also all the regular domestic stuff - cleaning, cooking, washing up, etc, takes time. On Doulos, I’d frequently be working until 6.15, pop down to the dining room, grab a plate of food, and the continue working while eating my meal. Same for lunch, and often Breakfast. Here, a meal can take over an hour. I guess it’s good, helping me to slow down… but BOY is it frustrating.
Like yesterday, I hoped to get a video project edited and finished… but then after Prayer Breakfast at the Office, I got a lift to the Shed (where we keep the vechicals), and picked up some equipment there, then got a lift to the Studio, and it was already 12.30. At lunch, there were a whole bunch of announcements and talking… and then with computers taking a long time to work, and Final Cut Server being a pain, I didn’t actually get to editing until 2.30pm!! And then Final Cut Pro decided to act stupid and to forget half the work I did with the Multi-Camera Editing tool (which otherwise is VERY cool…)…. So I only really got about 2 hours work done. Still, I’d done enough prep work with the lighting to make the keying and stuff a fairly easy job. I spent most of today editing too, and so that’s another piece basically finished.
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Before I begin today’s tale, there are a few things I must first explain. The first is that the UK has these things called “Bank Holiday Mondays”, which basically means most people with office-type jobs don’t work on random mondays throughout the year. Nobody whom I’ve asked seems to know what these Bank Holiday Mondays are in aid of, nevertheless, they seem quite keen on them, generally as they happen to be some of the people who don’t work on these aforementioned Bank Holiday Mondays.
The second thing I’d like to mention is that I’m kind of used to the Doulos work week, which means that also, most people don’t work on Mondays, however, we do work every other day, including Saturday and Sunday.
So being here in Carlisle, where the team has 2 days off per week (Saturday and Sunday) is quite a rare and interesting experience. Then these Bank Holiday Mondays on top of that, wow! It’s surprising they get any work done at all! We had one of these Mondays about 2 weeks ago.
The third thing, is that you should now promptly remove all of the above from your current thoughts, but allow it to drift uninhibited and unwatched into the depths of your subconcious general knowledge. This will put you in a better frame of mind for listening to the rest of the tale, but also put you in roughly the same state as I was 4 days ago.
I got up as usual, showered, dressed, and made myself a rather tasty cappuccino with my breakfast. I headed early to the Shed to start getting some audio files ready for posting later on this week. So I got to the shed about 10 past 7, my housemate was still asleep when I left, and while I was walking to the Shed, I thought
“Once I’ve got these files going, I’ll try walking to the Office (which is on the opposite end of town) for 9am devotions” (that we have together with the Office staff 3 times a week).
So once my audio files were happily working, I set out from the Shed at about 8:15 and started walking at a reasonable pace towards the office. I kind of hoped to see the bus at the bus stop as I went past, and maybe see my housemate on it.
No sign of the bus.
“Hm,” I thought, checking my watch.
“8:23.. that bus must be a bit later than I thought.”
I picked up the pace a bit, thinking, “I wonder if I can get to the office before the bus and my housemate do!” and briskly hopped down the steps to the underpass, and headed through the park.
One cool thing about Carlisle is the rabbits. There are wild rabbits all over the place! I’m sure the local farmers hate them and so on, but I quite enjoy seeing them all over the place as I walk about early in the morning, and while along the footpath I saw a rabbit jumping out of my way.
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I always knew a few people who loved trains. I even knew one or two people who built model rail-ways at home, usually in some deserted far off loft or study.
I’ve suddenly discovered, much to my surprise, that this is not one or two isolated individuals, but in fact apparently a large percentage of the male population of this part of the UK.
I never expected to learn that.
They call themselves Anoraks, and about a third of the people I’m working with belong to this group.
OK, So trains can look quite cool, and I am working with the media and computers team of the company, so it’s no surprise, I suppose, that you find a higher pecentage of people here with high IQ / arcane / obscure hobbies…
But it’s not just little nerdy geeks with glasses wandering around with notebooks and flasks of tea getting all excited about 7.25" gauge K1 engines and 1937 liveries, it’s a lot of guys, of every background, upbringing, shape, size, character and personality.
We had finished setting up for one of those J.John conferences, and were hanging out round the back waiting for it to be time to start, when this anglican vicar looking bloke wandered up, and they all ended up chatting about trains.
And all the rest of the guys too: those few who don’t have a thing about machines that roll around the place on parallel tracks get excited by all kinds of other things.
There’s a bloke here who gets very excited about trucks, vans, busses, and other large automobiles.
When I say “excited”, I mean in the kind of “eyes light up, bounces up and down and starts talking animatedly and waving his arms around” kind of way.
And he’s not a tiny geek. He’s an (roughly) 8 foot tall construction yard manager from London.
I watched two guys across the room at a pizza evening last week. They were discussing the intricacies of the AT command set, and the fun to be had trying to fix router systems by logging in backwards through a modem to solve networking problems.
Let’s turnout to a diverging track for a few moments, and I’ll see if I can work us back to this rail at the next set of points.
I went out yesterday an bought a whole load of books at charity shops. I finally got a copy of St. Augustine’s confessions.
“Even now I cannot fully understand why the Greek language, which I learned as a child, was so distasteful to me… "
I found this sentence funny, in itself, but lets keep reading for a while, and a few pages later get to this:
“For I understood not a single word and I was constantly subjected to violent threats and cruel punishments to make me learn.
“As a baby, of course, I knew no Latin either, but I learned it without fear and fret, simply by keeping my ears open while my nurses fondled me and everyone laughed and played happily with me.
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